We are proud to announce that the Nike 2017 Literary Prize has been awarded to Cezary Łazarewicz for his reportage Żeby nie było śladów. Sprawa Grzegorza Przemyka (So There Were No Traces. The Case of Grzegorz Przemyk).

Cezary Łazarewicz’s book is devoted to the famous case of Grzegorz Przemyk, a Polish student who was beaten to death by communist militia.

On 12 May 1983, a militia patrol in Warsaw’s Old Town arrested the nineteen-year-old while he was celebrating his school-leaving exams with friends. At the local police station, the officers decided to teach the young man a lesson because he had refused to show his ID card. They beat him unconscious making sure that there would be “no traces”, but they damaged his internal organs. Two days later Grzegorz Przemyk died.

His funeral turned into one of the greatest spontaneous demonstrations against the regime attended by several dozen thousands of people. His henchmen escaped punishment even after Poland regainded its sovereignity after 1989.

In his book Łazarewicz analyses the case step by step attempting to reconstuct the facts and to show how the lie around it has been built by the regime’s officials and how it has never been fully revealed.